Page 59 of Made for You
A sigh escaped before I could stop it. “No. I wish you could, but I think maybe she just needs me a minute.” I took her other hand in mine, gripping firmly. “I hope that doesn’t sound arrogant, I—”
“Not at all. Please, I honestly get it. I mean, I have no idea what’s going on, but I get thatyouare her person, and she needs you. So go.”
She smiled so sweetly and earnestly, it shredded me to have to leave her.
And I wouldn’t just yet. I stepped in, releasing her hands so I could cradle her head in my palms, sifting my fingers into her hair and not stopping the momentum of the movement until our mouths met and pressed together like we were made for this. Like her plush lips were designed to curve to mine.
I shouldn’t have made the sound, the hunger and relief taking me by surprise once again, and yet I did. There was no stopping it with this connection, this slide and release, press and nip, touch and chase. Good grief, how I wanted more, and yet, now was not the time.
“I do not want to leave,” I said, resting my forehead against hers and taking in the sight of her hands fisted in my shirt.
“I don’t want you to either, but one of the things I like most about you is the fact that I know you’re going to.”
I pulled back to get a look at her glorious eyes. “And one of the things I like most about you is the fact that I know you get it.”
I stole one last kiss and released her so she could step to the door. She didn’t play coy or fumble her keys—she went right in, not making me wait. I sucked in a deep breath and hopped into my car, drove the thirty seconds to my own garage, and parked.
I took ten seconds to breathe through the rapid change of pace and get my head right. The switch from Bruce, Nikki’s date who wanted to devour her, to Bruce, legal guardian and big brother of Kiley, took a quick second.
A minute later, I climbed the stairs and knocked lightly on Kiley’s door. A beat after that, she opened it, a little heap of a person blinking back at me from a mascara-streaked face, then turned and plodded away.
I hooked a hand around her arm and tugged her back, all the way into my arms. Hers came around my middle and her head burrowed in, a guttural, pained sound emerging muffled into my shirt.
My heart rate spiked, and I clutched her to me. “I’m here. I’m here, Ki.”
A thousand other things brimmed on my tongue.I’m sorry. Tell me how to fix this. Tell me who to murder. Please tell me what’s wrong. Please let me help you.
The fact that she’d taken my hug and allowed me to comfort her might’ve meant she was letting some of that guard down, but my gut told me it was just that bad. Whatever had made this day so awful for her, the reason she’d said something about it in the first place raised the hairs on my arms.
“Ki, can you tell me?” I asked, urging her away a bit.
She pulled back, a ragged little raccoon with red eyes and a face that broke my heart.
“Marcus told me we needed to take a break.” She sneered on the last word, then practically growled and pulled the bottom of her sweatshirt up to scrub her face with it. When she pulled it away, she looked just as much a mess, but her face wasn’t wet with tears anymore, and she seemed bolstered by the move.
So often now, she seemed like a woman. She knew what she liked and had goals. She had a boyfriend—not that this made her a woman, but it was one more thing she had that she’d chosen. For a girl who’d only had so many choices, these things mattered. Class schedules and friends and a boyfriend and participation in things that interested her.
Right now, that movement seemed so childish, so endearinglyyoung, and I was reminded again what a volatile little jerk I was at sixteen. I’d never stop being grateful I wasn’t parenting myself at this age, even when things got challenging with her.
“I take it you don’t agree?” I asked, keenly feeling the eggshell atmosphere.
She slumped onto a blow-up chair she’d gotten this past summer for her birthday, a “retro” piece of flair that’d been popular when I was not far from her age and therefore an item that made me feel the years between us vividly.
Arms crossed, dark hair sagging to one side in her ponytail with wisps coming out on all sides like little horns, she made another growly response before saying, “No.”
I would’ve laughed, her grumpiness a weird relief to me after those tears, but her face crumpled. She opened her mouth to say something, then shut it.
A vise closed around my heart and cinched tight, tighter. She struggled for words, eyes welling with new tears.
“I just…” Her lip quivered and she choked out, “Why am I so easy to leave?”
Oh. God. Help me.
There is a kind of pain only parents feel, and I hadn’t raised Kiley all her life but I felt it…. as close as I could experience, here it was, opening a pit in my chest, gnawing its way through every useless bit of flesh and bone into the very soul of me and ravaging.
This was more than grief over her idiot boyfriend. This wasn’t a side issue, something we’d talk through and move past in a night. And if I stayed quiet any longer, if I didn’t have a good answer, we might never talk about it again.
I moved to her, crossing the space in an instant and dropping to a knee, silently cursing the blow-up chair for being the only place to sit other than her bed, which just wasn’t close enough.
